Jobless Rate In Cortland County Rises, But Still Below Double-Digits

Cortland County’s 7.7% unemployment rate in February was up from 7.1% a year ago and it’s more than a full point above the average rate 0f 6.3% for all the counties in Central New York.

Karen Knapik-Scalzo is an analyst with the state labor department, “It’s still from a historical standpoint, still well below the double-digit levels we saw back in February 2012 when we were at 10.2% in the Cortland area.”

She says we are doing better than six years ago, “And we’ve seen some recovery in terms of our rates being lower than the double-digit levels, but we still have been seeing a little bit of slowness in terms of our job growth in Cortland County, especially in the private sector.”

Knapik-Scalzo identified areas where jobs were lost. “For instance, our trade, transportation and utilities sector was down 200 jobs over the year, and our leisure and hospitality was down 200. Those seem to be the largest in terms of the job losses.”

Where are the job gains? “We’ve seen some job gains within our private educational and health services sector which was up 200 over the year for Cortland County.”

She points out something to remember about this statistic. “The impact shows up a little bit more, in terms of percents, when you’re looking at a small population base.”

Cortland County’s unemployment rate is ranked 50th out of 62 New York counties for February 2018.

The NYS Labor Department counted 21,600 jobs in our county last month, 600 fewer than a year ago or a half-percent drop.

There were 1,800 people without jobs here in February, 100 more than a year ago.

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